Month: January 2015

Small things

I – along with most of the country – have been obsessed with Serial. If you haven’t heard, its a NPR podcast based on a homicide case in Baltimore from 1999. It draws you in fast and never really lets up. Check it out if you haven’t already. There’s even a Reddit site dedicated to the podcast. Some people have done some quite amazing maps/animations cross-referencing the cell tower data vs call logs vs timelines.

Also pimping my current podcasting app of choice here: Overcast. iOS only tho.

Also, been trying to lose weight. Been decently successful tho I have not taken to extreme measures such as Jeremy. My tactic is quite simple – don’t eat meals unless you’re out with people. Snack sure, but full on meals just skip ’em.

Bidding & Long Hot Shower

This time, for my home trip,  both outbound (to Portland, OR) and inbound (to Knoxville, TN) flights were overbooked.  When doing checking-in online, an airline’s questionnaire was posted to request your lowest $$$ bid for being bumped to the next available flights.

Since I planned to stay in west coast less than 14 hours, there was no outbound bidding.  But, for inbound flight, I put a bid of $350.00.  After boarding all passengers, I was one of those being bumped. The lady agent at the gate podium asking me about to be bumped from noon flight (Portland -> Atlanta -> Knoxville) to red-eye flight [Portland (late evening) -> Los Angeles -> Atlanta (red eye) -> Knoxville (next morning)]. I told her it is handy that I have extra cash simply I, just like everyone else, have a family to support.  She looked at me and said “okay I give you $400.00.  $50.00 extra”.  So, I got $50.00 extra.

I used portion of this $400.00 to take our friends to dinner before my flight to Los Angeles.  The connection time was very tight.  Unfortunately, the plane had to burn more fuel on the runway before taking off because of the over weight issue.  It sat there 15 minutes just to burn.  Upon arrival, the plane waited another 30 minutes because our gate was occupied.  When I got off the plane, it had only 3 more minutes left.  Luckily this time, the flight to Atlanta was just next door.

At Atlanta airport, I bumped into three Chinese exchange researchers.  They completely lost with limited English skills.  Since their terminal and mine were the same, I took them to the gate.  Before that, I took them to breakfast also.  I can tell they didn’t like cheese and cold drinks.  We spent about 30 minutes together.

When arriving at my apartment, the first thing I did was taking a long, hot shower.  I lived without house hot water for almost two days.  Especially, after the yard work to remove more hazardous stuffs for Mom, it really, really felt funny.

I told Mom, for next home trip, I will book the exact same flights and bid again 🙂

Cold.

It is still cold.

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Vince had a pile of sand in his room called “kinetic sand”.  It’s a bunch of sand with some sort of gooey polymer blended in so that the concoction feels moldable and flowable.  He’s had it for many months and it does feel very nice when you run it through your hands.  Because the polymer holds the sand grains together, there was no sand scattered throughout the room.

On Thursday, Vince discovered that his sand pile was 3/4 gone and found a guilty looking dog next to the bowl.  Apparently Ruby ate the sand pile.  As a result, Ruby’s been shitting sand for a few days now.  It’s funny watching it come out because it falls out and crumbles just like the kinetic sand did when it fell out of your hand.  Poor girl.  At least her insides are scrubbed out.

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Vince got knock off Beats headphones this morning ($11 dollars, Target!).  He suddenly looks completely like the teenager that he is.

U Street Is Cold but in Good Shape

I arrived at U Street around 10:30 PM last night.  Without examining everywhere, it looks it is in very good shape.

As a student of “heat transfer”, I didn’t turn on the heat because by the time it reaches the desired temperature, I am sure I will be about to leave.  It needs to heat the whole house inside out – a lot of mass and air in it. Therefore, I went to bed right away,  a couple of minutes later, it was really warm inside my blankets.

Water is another problem.  Without it, no shower.  Well, I always can drive to Safeway, fast food restaurants to get warm water there.

For outbound flight coming to Portland, is was overbooked but I didn’t bid on the price to be bumped. However, for inbound flight to Knoxville, TN today, it was also overbooked and I did put a $350.00 bid and see what will happen.  I may do a lot of window shopping to observe all kinds of people coming and going in the airport.;

President Obama and I

Finally, this morning around 8:30 AM, President Obama’s schedule was published by the local radio station. Vice President (Air Force 2) and him (Air Force 1) are scheduled to land around noon.  And they will fly out separately around 4:10 PM. In between, they are going to visit the neighbor hood and highway that I am going to use to catch my flight around 4:00 PM.  Knoxville, TN has a very small dual purpose airport (civilian and military).  May be just too small for all these planes.

Therefore, I left my office around 10:00 AM and the airlines was kindly enough to change my flight to 11:30 AM without additional fee.  Guess what, the timing was pretty tight.  Therefore, without deplaned cleaning, everyone was rushed to his/her seat. The captain told us that we had the permission from the tower to take off.  Once on the runway, for some reasons, the tower changed her mind and denied us to take off.  We had to sit there for another 35 minutes just watching Air Force 2 landed and 20 minutes later, Air Force 1 finally arrived.  This is the second time I have seen Air Force 1.  The first time is in Houston while Clinton was the President.

It is good that both can come and visit a territory that overwhelmingly voted against them.  May be not just them but voted against those establishments inside the Beltway.  I kind of agree with them.  “Government is the Problem and Not the Solution” as President Reagon once said.

Recovery.

This is the week I’m starting to feel like myself again since I started sprinting the week of Thanksgiving.  After a very tightly scheduled fall term and an incredibly hectic and wonderful holiday season, I need this little bit of time to fall back into my beloved routines.  I have a couple of weeks before school starts up again, the kids are back in school (Vince has mid-year exams next week) and I’m closing out the first quarter at work this week.  I’m using this time to get myself up to speed on first-inventor-to-file prosecution rules vs first-inventor-to-invent rules as first-inventor-to-file went into effect last year and those cases are finally bubbling up to the top of my docket.

I’m also using this time to connect back up with friends in the neighborhood.  I essentially disappeared socially from my neighborly rounds and I expect that I will again when the term starts, so I’m meeting up with pals at the local ice cream parlor to catch up.  Yes, the local ice cream place is open all winter and people hang out there in the morning for a cup of coffee…

President Obama Will Visit East Tennessee Tomorrow

What a coincidence!  President Obama will visit Pellissippi State Community College at Hardin Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN. tomorrow (Friday, 1/9/15)  It is about 5 miles away from my office.  As a matter of fact, we have an office there too.

Evidently, he will fly in to TYS Airport (McGhee Tyson Airport at Alcoa – Knoxville Airport) which is a small civilian airport adjacent to a small military airport.  Probably, they even share the same runway.  I could see those air force planes took off from the runway while waiting for my flights.

But too bad, I need to fly out tomorrow afternoon to west coast from that airport too.  Hopefully, his tomorrow schedules (not published yet), do not interfere mine too much.  To make things worse, in order to get to the airport, I have to drive through Pellissippi Highway which is the main highway for Hardin Valley Road.

Well, all I can do is to wait and see :0)

Freezing.

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It’s freezing here.  I know, it’s freezing almost everywhere in the country.  Lots of indoor treadmill running where I’m hoping for a few days of above freezing temps to melt the ice so I can head outside again. At least I have lots of company these first few weeks of January.

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Hooray!  Edda’s wheelchair got new brakes today.  That only took three months or so.  We are still missing some arm straps and a bolt for a swivel brace that locks the frame in place, but it’s usable on the bus.  I hate this new wheelchair design, it drives me bonkers.

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Jeremy took me out for empanadas tonight – a place in Bethesda.  We usually avoid having dates in Bethesda because, in the past, whenever we go to Bethesda on a date, something goes wrong and we end up getting mad at each other.  But this date went well despite the choice of location.

We saw a Swedish movie – Force Majeure, a dark comedy about marriage.  Jeremy found it much funnier than I thought he would.  He can be particular about movies.  So much so that I will go to a movie myself without even thinking of inviting him.  Perhaps it was the two beers he had during the movie that helped him enjoy it.

Snow day.

After two weeks of holiday, we couldn’t even manage 2 days in a row without a disruption in our schedule.  The snow storm was forcasted to hit Rockville at 4 am and peter out by 9 am.  So when we awoke at quarter to 6 and checked our phones in the darkness of our bedroom (two little glowing screens in the pitch black), we saw that school was delayed 2 hours.

We groaned and got up anyways because no matter the schedule, Edda’s up by 6, which means we are up by 6.  But Vince got to sleep in at least.  But there was some optimism in the morning because the kids would GO TO SCHOOL eventually.  But the snow didn’t stop and they cancelled school at around 8 am.  By that time, Vince had painted Edda’s toenails and I had decluttered some filing cabinets and found these super cute school photos of Vince circa 2007.

Vince made me lunch.  He can be an excellent from-scratch cook (Jeremy is teaching him well), but he knows with me, he can coax me into a fish stick lunch.

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Of course, I needed to go shovel my mother’s driveway.  I couldn’t do it until late in the day today.  I actually asked her very early in the morning to call someone and pay them to shovel her driveway and if she couldn’t do that, I’d be there by 5pm.  I called her at 3 pm to see if anyone had shoveled her driveway and she told me that she hadn’t gotten anyone to do it, but she insisted that I not come over to shovel.  I asked her how she intended to leave the house without falling over snow and ice.  She said that she would wait until it melted.  I sighed.  I don’t think it’s going to get above freezing for 4 days.

Anyways, by the time I got there at 5 pm, she had shoveled the whole driveway.  Remember, my mom has fallen and broken her shoulder just not so many weeks ago.  My mother is crazy.  I understand this means I’m crazy too.  As I left her house, she called happily after me, “See!  I’m not old, I can still shovel snow!”